When comparing Materialize vs Material Design Lite, the Slant community recommends Material Design Lite for most people. In the question“What is the best CSS framework?” Material Design Lite is ranked 12th while Materialize is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Material Design Lite is:
Material Design Lite is a framework created by Google, who are also responsible for the creation of Material Design.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great-looking demo
Pro Device agnostic
Since Materialize follows Google's guidelines for Material design, which in theory is device agnostic, Materialize itself is device agnostic too. It's designed to look good on every device.
Pro Large selection of components
CSS components: Badges, buttons, cards, collections, footer, forms, icons, navbar, pagination, preloader.
JavaScript components: Collapsible, Dialogs, Dropdown, Media, Modals, Parallax, Pushpin, ScrollFire, Scrollspy, SideNav, Tabs, Transitions, Waves.
Mobile-specific: slide-out drawer menu, toasts.
Pro Responsive
Pro Mobile navigation
Pro Nice showcase of sites built with Materialize
Pro Customizable
While the default style is not bad at all, Materialize also gives developers the ability to customize it and fit their own style, while still keeping in line with the Material Design philosophy.
Along with the CSS files, designers can also download the SASS files which can be edited and compiled.
Pro 12-Column Grid System
Pro Included icon font
Pro Meteor.js integration by developers
Pro Opinionated
Material design is very opinionated on how design elements should behave and look. The basics of which revolve around certain visual elements (physics, space, momentum and light) which are used to create specific UX elements.
This is very helpful because it creates a consistent feel without making every design look the same. This can be seen in Materialize too, where each element may be customized but still it keeps the consistent look of the material design.
Pro Developed by Google
Material Design Lite is a framework created by Google, who are also responsible for the creation of Material Design.
Pro Very customizable
Cons
Con Refuses to use the flexbox model
Even though Materialize states that it only supports IE10+, which supports flexbox quite well, with prefixes, Materialize has refused to use Flexbox.
Con Not maintained anymore
Con Large / heavy
267 kilobytes, minified, for the CSS and JS.
Con Deprecated
No longer supported by their maintainers.
Con Deprecated
No longer maintained
Con On limited support
Google moved further development efforts to Material Components for the web.